Editorial: Oyster farm move refocuses the debate

Brigid Lunny sells oysters to the Lara family in the retail oyster shack at Drakes Bay Oyster company in Point Reyes National Seashore, Calif. Thursday, November 29, 2012. Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar called Kevin Lunny this morning to personally deliver the bad news that the oyster company's lease will not be renewed. (Special to the IJ/James Cacciatore)

CUTTING TIES with a Republican-linked public advocacy group, Drakes Bay Oyster Co. has given its critics one less thing to complain about.

The Point Reyes oyster farm's owners, the Lunny family, decided to sever its connections to Cause of Action, after the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group challenged a PBS-TV story and demanded that it disclose its background material and outtakes.

Kevin Lunny said it was an overstep by Cause of Action that he could not support.

Lunny made the right move.

Cause of Action and its conservative Republican links had become an ample target for oyster farm critics. It was obscuring the real issues in the debate over the oyster farm.

Critics did their best to shape the debate as a Republican-driven wedge to open national parklands for private development.

In reality, there has been a business harvesting oysters in Drakes Estero for nearly 100 years. The parkland leased to Johnson's Oysters and, in recent years, to Drakes Bay Oyster Co., has been designated for potential wilderness for decades.

The future of the oyster farm deserves to be decided without the interference of Beltway politics.

There are many issues — fairness, wilderness, local control vs. national interests, jobs, agriculture in parkland, history and environmental preservation — that should transcend Washington party politics.

In November, after years of debate, then-Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar announced that the federal government was going to let the oyster company's lease expire, requiring the Lunny family to remove its business, allowing the site to be restored to wilderness.

Salazar's decision followed a political push by the National Park Service and some environmental groups to end the lease. The park service's handling of the lease should never be held up as a model for fair and open landlord-tenant relations.

Lunny has sued, challenging the Interior Department's decision and the environmental report that led up to it. The decision is now in the hands of judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court. A decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Cause of Action has provided legal and PR support for Lunny's last-ditch effort to keep the oyster farm open.

Kevin Lunny, in severing ties with Cause of Action, thanked it for its work and noted that he had a different approach to the media and free press.

"We defend freedom of the press. Our goal and mission is to save farming and farmland in West Marin and West Marin's agricultural economy," Lunny said.

Lunny and his local legal team retain that local focus. Cause of Action's involvement raised questions about broader political implications and agendas.

Lunny's decision puts the focus back on the family-run oyster business, keeping Marin's small but growing aquaculture industry thriving and a longheld federal goal of expanding wilderness areas in Point Reyes National Seashore.